Table Of ContentWomen Writing Trauma in the Global
South
Through exploring complex suffering in the writings of Aminatta Forna,
Isabel Allende and Anuradha Roy, Women Writing Trauma in the Global
South dismantles conceptual shortcomings and problematic imbalances
at the core of existing theorizations around psychological trauma. The
global constellation of women writers from Sierra Leone, Chile and India
facilitates a productive analysis of how the texts navigate intertwined
experiences of individual and systemic trauma. The discussion departs
from a recent critical turn in literary and cultural trauma studies and
transgresses many interrelated boundaries of geocultural contexts, lan-
guage and genre. Discovering the role of literary forms in reparative
articulation and empathic witnessing, this critical intervention develops
new ideas for an inclusive conceptual expansion of trauma from the
global peripheries and contributes to the ongoing debate on marginalized
suffering.
Annemarie Pabel is an independent researcher with a PhD in English lit-
erature. Her research interests include trauma studies and women’s
writing.
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Women Writing Trauma in the Global South
A Study of Aminatta Forna, Isabel Allende and Anuradha Roy
Annemarie Pabel
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Women Writing Trauma in
the Global South
A Study of Aminatta Forna, Isabel
Allende and Anuradha Roy
Annemarie Pabel
First published 2023
by Routledge
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© 2023 Annemarie Pabel
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-032-21117-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-32469-2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-26682-2 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003266822
Typeset in Sabon
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Contents
1 Introduction: Concepts and Contexts of Psychological
Wounding 1
Canonical Cultural Trauma Theory and Emerging
Critical Perspectives 4
The Case for a Reconceptualization of Trauma 7
Wound Narratives from the Global South 9
2 Aminatta Forna 13
Fictional Representations of Traumatic Disintegration in
The Memory of Love 15
Prolonged and Insidious Trauma in The Devil that
Danced on the Water 22
Narrative Critique of the PTSD Category in
Happiness 32
Narrative Negotiations of a Context-specific Trauma
Model 39
Complicated Witnessing in The Devil that Danced on the
Water 44
Unempathic Gazing and Professional Witnessing in
Happiness 51
Post-traumatic Resilience in Happiness 56
3 Isabel Allende 69
Writing during Trauma in Paula 71
Fictional Representations of Childhood Trauma in
Portrait in Sepia 76
Inscriptions of Trauma in Landscape: Exile and Mental
Dislocation 83
vi Contents
Resurfacing of Wounds in Storytelling 89
Epistolary Narration in Articulating Bereavement 94
Magical Realist Elements in Representing the
Unspeakable 99
Photography as a Testimonial Practice in Portrait in
Sepia 104
Narrating ‘Belonging’ in My Invented Country 110
4 Anuradha Roy 115
Fictional Representations of Prolonged Childhood
Violence 116
Topographic and Architectural Manifestations of
Traumatic Unhomeliness in An Atlas of Impossible
Longing 123
Familial Disintegration and Unhomeliness 130
Self-Awareness and Transgression of Forms in
Articulating Trauma 136
Epistolary Elements and Narrative Authority 143
5 Conclusion: Connecting Trauma Narratives in the
Global South 152
Inscriptions of Complex Wounds 152
Towards Conceptual Inclusivity 158
Bibliography 163
Index 170
1 Introduction
Concepts and Contexts of Psychological
Wounding
Experiences of physiological and psychological wounding are rampant in
our world which is facing multiple humanitarian, political and ecological
crises. Often such crises become irreversibly enmeshed in one another
and create prolonged, multilayered forms of traumatic suffering. Amidst
these global crises, some contexts and populations are affected dispro-
portionately by such wounding phenomena. In the global South, where
most of the world’s population lives, the risk of experiencing trauma is
compounded by factors, such as war, poverty, displacement and disen-
franchisement. However, the majority of health and mental health
research is conducted in the global North with the result that such fields
may not adequately grasp and represent the realities, contexts and needs
of the victims and survivors in the global South. Women, and especially
women of colour, have been disproportionally exposed to multiple forms
of prolonged and systemic violence, yet the available literature does not
fully represent these realities and the underlying layers of disempower-
ment. Thus, the ways in which women’s voices have been silenced have
carried far-reaching implications on how trauma is recorded and faced as
well as on the survivors’ agency.
Women Writing Trauma in the Global South examines modalities of
psychological trauma in selected works by three women writers from the
global South: the Scottish Sierra Leonean writer Aminatta Forna, the
Chilean American author Isabel Allende and Anuradha Roy from India.
It seeks to examine manifestations of complex and prolonged experiences
of trauma occurring in literature and the ways in which literary forms
facilitate such representations. In particular, it focuses on multilayered
and interrelated forms of trauma which exceed conventional conceptual-
izations of trauma1 such as war, exile, extensive childhood sexual abuse,
maternal bereavement and familial disintegration. For the argument of
this book, three texts from each author’s body of literary work have been
selected: Forna’s memoir The Devil that Danced on the Water: A
Daughter’s Quest (2003) and her novels The Memory of Love (2010)
and Happiness (2010); Allende’s memoirs Paula (1994), My Invented
Country (2004) and Portrait in Sepia (2000); and Roy’s novels An Atlas
DOI: 10.4324/9781003266822-1
2 Introduction
of Impossible Longing (2008), Sleeping on Jupiter (2015) and All the
Lives We Never Lived (2018). This focus on women writers from differ-
ent contexts in the global South is motivated by an imbalance in critical
attention and the validation extreme forms of suffering receive globally
and across gender lines. Through exploring literary representations of
fundamentally disruptive experiences and concomitant psychological
suffering, this book argues that each narrative reveals problematic aspects
of the established category of trauma. The cultural canon of trauma the-
ory, which is largely constructed around the horrors of the Holocaust
and, more recently, 9/11, has come under critique for its Westocentric
focus and the marginalization of suffering in non-Western contexts. The
centrality of the Holocaust is paralleled by a literary paradigm of
Holocaust memoirs and survivor narratives in which male-centred
accounts predominated for a long time. Simultaneously, the West’s com-
plicity in the creation of chronic suffering globally and the popularization
of the term trauma are hardly deniable phenomena.
The constellation of writers and texts in this book transgresses many
interrelated boundaries of geographical and cultural contexts, language
and genre in grappling with horror and suffering. Concomitantly, it
unveils intersecting histories of multilayered violence generated by war,
political unrest, racist discourse, as well as by exilic and cultural displace-
ment across contexts. Within these transgressions of boundaries, the nar-
ratives offer focal points for a critical engagement with contextual and
conceptual limitations of the traditional cultural trauma category. In the
writing of all three authors, forms of political conflict play a central role
and affect the creation of trauma to varying degrees. Both Forna’s mem-
oir The Devil that Danced on the Water: A Daughter’s Quest (2003) and
her novel The Memory of Love (2010) thematize the political unrest
leading up to the Sierra Leonean Civil War between 1991 and 2002 as
well as its devastating aftermath. Allende’s memoirs Paula (1994) and My
Invented Country (2004) draw on the military dictatorship in Chile
between 1973 and 1990, while two of Roy’s texts address the violence
shaping the time period around the partition of India in 1947. Set in
politically and culturally uprooted Bengal during 1907 and 1956, her
novel An Atlas of Impossible Longing (2008) follows three generations
of an Indian family and is set in the years prior to, during and after the
partition. Roy’s novel All the Lives We Never Lived (2018) draws on the
tension prior to the partition more subtly. Although these context-specific
conflicts vary distinctly in nature and effect, the different authors’ writing
of these conflicts shares a central concern with how violent political con-
ditions infiltrate ordinary everyday life and become enmeshed with other
forms of violence. Specifically, painful familial disintegration and
unhomeliness, as a result of either political violence, racism and/or mater-
nal bereavement and abandonment, features in the writing of all three
authors. Both Forna’s and Allende’s lived realities and, subsequently, their
Introduction 3
writing have been impacted by political exile and the experiences of dis-
placement and ‘unbelonging’ these conditions produce. Their memoirs, in
particular, are concerned with experiences of exile. Similarly, Forna and
Allende have both traversed from the southern to the northern hemi-
sphere, leaving their native Sierra Leone for Scotland and Chile for the
United States, respectively. In Forna’s novel The Memory of Love and
Happiness and in Allende’s My Invented Country, the authors’ intimate
familiarity with two different geocultural contexts reflects in their critical
stance on theoretical and clinical conceptualizations of trauma. Much
like exilic and contextual transgressions, the multiplicity of genres and
narrative modes is central to each author’s navigation of proximity to
and perspectives on traumatic experience and corrupted memory.
Resurfacing memories and traumatic reliving are encountered by the
characters of Forna’s The Memory of Love and Allende’s Portrait in
Sepia. At the same time, both Allende’s Portrait in Sepia and Roy’s All the
Lives We Never Lived are fictional memoirs in which the protagonists
destabilize clear boundaries of genre and narrative authority in overcom-
ing their traumatic experiences through modes of life writing.
In light of these (con)textual transgressions, Women Writing Trauma in
the Global South proposes that a conjunctional exploration of these
authors’ writing can broaden global intersections of extreme historic vio-
lence, literary forms and conceptual limitations. In order to trace such
borderlines and their potentially subversive qualities, the exploration of
each body of narratives progresses from an analysis of represented
wounds to aspects of representability through a focus on form and their
possible implications. More specifically, it delineates textually inscribed
traumatic wounds and the forms of violence behind these intrusive and
distorting phenomena. Thereafter, it examines the role of literary forms in
representing such experiences and asks what reparative practices differ-
ent articulatory modes may engender. The global constellation of texts,
authors and theoretical perspectives constitutes both the original contri-
bution and the central challenge of this book: to sustain critical aware-
ness of context- and culture-specific meaning and boundaries in a
comparative exploration of shared traumatic suffering and its global (in)
validation. To conceive of the disintegrative and isolating subjectivity
that characterizes trauma experientially across varying sets of circum-
stances, Ruth Klüger’s notion of timescape offers a conceptual point of
departure for this intervention. Her 2001 autobiography Still Alive: A
Holocaust Girlhood Remembered, in which the Holocaust survivor grap-
ples with the immense difficulty of fully conveying a particular traumatic
past transcontextually, is oftentimes considered a formative part of the
otherwise male-dominated literary Holocaust canon and of
Erinnerungskultur (culture of remembering).2 She uses the term times-
cape to “indicate the nature of a place in time, that is, at a certain time,
neither before nor after” (2001:67). The relevance of Klüger’s concept
